Relational Aesthetics

Space-time exchange Factors:

Speaking of artworks in the 1990s, Bourriaud writes:

The negotiation is undertaken in a spirit of transparency which hallmarks it as a product of human labour. The work of art actually shows (or suggests) not only its manufacturing and production process, its position within the set of exchanges, and the place, or function it allocates to the beholder, but also the creative behaviour of the artist (otherwise put, the sequence of posture and gestures which make up his/her word, and which each individual work passes on like a sample or marker). (NB: RA 41)

Barter Activity

Art represents a barter activity that cannot be regulated by any currency, or any "common substance". It is the division of meaning the wild state-an exchange whose form is by that of the object itself, before being so defined by definitions form to it. (NB: RA 42)

Artistic Practice and Relations

The artist's practice, and his behaviour as producer, determines the relation that will be struck up with his work. In other words, what he produces, first and foremost, is relations between people and the world, by way of aesthetic objects. (NB: RA 42)

These artists perceive their work from a threefold viewpoint, at once aesthetic (how is it translated into material terms?), historical (how is to be incorporated in a set of artistic references?) and social (how is to find a coherent poisiton with regard to the current state of productions and social relations?). (NB: RA 46)

Relational Art

Relational art is not the revival of any movement, nor is it the comeback of any style. It arises from an observation of the present and from a line of thinking about the fate of artistic activity...[Interactivity] resides in the fact that this generation of artists considers inter-subjectivity and interaction neither as fashionable theoretical gadgets, nor as additives (alibis) of a traditional artistic practice. It takes them as a point of departure and as an outcome, in brief, as the main informers of their activity. The space where their works are displayed is altogether the space of interaction, the space of openness that ushers in all dialogue. (NB: RA 44)

Proximity and Intimacy

The artwork of the 1990s turns the beholder into a neighbor, a direct interlocutor. It is precisely the attitude of this generation toward communications that makes it possible to define it in relation to previous generations. (NB: RA 43)

Social interstice and Good-enough thinking

The artwork is presented as a social interstice which these experiments and these new "life possibilities" appear to be possible. It seems more pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbors in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows. (NB: RA 45)

Conflict--or a lack thereof

These days we are no longer trying to advance by means of conflictual clashes, by way of the invention of new assemblages, possible relations between basic units, and alliances struck up between different partners. Aesthetic contracts, like social contracts, are abided by for what they are.(NB: RA 45)

Responsive Forms:

...what are the right exhibition methods in relation to the cultural context and in relation to the history of art as it is being currently updated?

The Everyday:

And above all, the everyday now turns out to be a much more fertile terrain than pop culture--a form that only exists in contrast to high culture, through it and for it. (NB: RA 47)

Beyond conceptual art:
- The artworks don't celebrate immateriality; process doesn't have supremacy over product.

Organizing Sociality:

Objects and institutions, and the use of time and works, are at once the outcome of human relations--for they render social work concrete--and producers of relations--for, conversely, they organize types of sociability and regulate inter-human encounters. (NB: RA 48)

Space and Time - the relationship to the relationship - If, as NB suggests, today's art encourages us to contemplate time and space in a different way, then the question becomes: How? In what ways does it do this? Moreover, if it's about introducing new comparative factors...

What has one bought when one owns a work by Tiravanija or Douglas Gordon, other than a relationship with the world rendered concrete by an object, which per se, defines the relations one has towards this relation: the relationship to a relationship? (NB: RA 48)

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